Well, there are a lot of numbers in there. Spurred on by Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office, every government department has released each transaction over £25,000. It's about £80bn of an annual spend of £670bn – the single most detailed public spending data release in British history. It provides unique insights into the complex world of how the government spends your money.

The release is the latest in a series of major data publications by the government, which came into power determined to unleash a "tsunami of data". So far, releases have included the enormous Treasury database, Coins; salaries of senior civil servants; staff numbers and the detailed organisational structure of each department.

The government has certainly adopted transparency in a big way. The "big society" declaration published by Downing Street included a key line: "We will create a new 'right to data' so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis."

Yet there has been criticism of the way some data has been released. The publication of Coins data was so confusing the Treasury had to run seminars on how to use it. Some civil servants are privately critical of the way personnel numbers were released early on in the coalition, too – "This is incomplete data, being rushed out," said one.

As for the data itself, it covers over nearly 200,000 individual transactions, payments to suppliers and bills covered by government departments in the first five months of the life of the coalition. There's lots excluded: the NHS, benefit payments, spending by quangos, information removed for "national security" and personally confidential reports.

The releases haven't stopped yet either – in January next year, street-by-street crime figures will be published, as well as every item of spending over £500 by local authorities in England. And full details of every contract over £25,000 will be published, too.

But will it change anything? In some ways, it already has. The welter of releases have made the UK one of the most data-friendly countries in the world: Data.gov.uk, the official data release site, now contains over 5,600 datasets, compared with under 1,500 for its US equivalent, Data.gov.

One nagging concern is that some data publications packed with useful info have gone. While departmental business plans published this month do contain key data, for instance, other key documents such as annual reports and supplementary budgets – which contained more detailed information – have been stopped.

But the biggest issue with all these numbers is, how do you use them? If people don't have the tools to interrogate the spreadsheets, they may as well be written in Latin. And, when you have as much data released as this, proper analysis at home is tricky.

The question that strikes me is this: how much is analysing this data the responsibility of the government? As journalists and campaigners, we've spent years asking for raw information. Isn't it time for us to step up to the plate and develop our own ways to interrogate the data and hold the government to account?

In stark contrast to the rushed Coins publication, independent developers, graphic artists and we in the Guardian's data journalism team have had embargoed access to it for two weeks and the government is planning to showcase many of the applications that have resulted. You can see our explorer here – and those developed as part of the release here.

One thing is certain: we know more about public spending in Britain now than ever before. As we brace ourselves for levels of cuts not seen since the 1980s, we're not going to be short of numbers telling us exactly how bad things get.

If information really is power, we just have to work out how to wield it.

According to figures released today as an act of political transparency, DLA Piper, where Miriam González Durántez is a senior partner, was paid £87,875 during first five months of coalition government